I don't know what sort of "data" you might want. There are modes of argumentation that do not rely on double-blind randomised trials. The argument is, essentia

I don't know what sort of "data" you might want. There are modes of argumentation that do not rely on double-blind randomised trials. The argument is, essentially: - people used to believe that being a chess grandmaster is universally considered proof of high intelligence - people also believed that opening a refrigerator requires strictly less intelligence than becoming a chess grandmaster - we now have build artificial "intelligence" that easily beats any human in chess. Ask it to open a refrigerator and see what happens. -> Therefore, our concept of "intelligence", as a single, ordered, continuous, and measurable quantity, is demonstrably wrong. You can proof plenty with a single datapoint or two. As long as you don't care about the color, half a sheep proofs sheep exist. There's no n and no p-value attached to that because it is not subject to measuring errors and confounders. Sheep just is. They article isn't quite clear on how our biases are potentially dangerous, because it happens to be the point of warnings to come before the actual damage occurs. But when someone is setting out to revolutionise all our lives with something that uses the term "intelligence", and neither they nor we can actually come up with definition of the concept, maybe the burden of proof should be on those saying it's all fine, and not those asking for a bit of occasional reflection. I also just don't get what's controversial about the article. It doesn't even ask for anything dramatic, or specific. It's the MIT robot tech leader, who knows what they're talking about. And when people start invoking the human rights of abused robots, I am confident the robotics community wouldn't object to that being either a joke or misguided anthropomorphising.